TFS and Office 2010 Beta connections

I do a lot of work with TFS and one of the things I have to do is use Excel to deliver Gantt charts to management at the various clients I have.

I use excel to build a chart that reads the Interactions and assembles them (along with some sprint info) into a very workable chart that looks like a standard project management Gantt, but requires none of my time to produce.





The problem came when one client updated my Office install to the 2010 Beta (not that I was complaining at the time). The issue was, when I opened the spreadsheet that talks to the TFS server, I got a rude error saying that "TF84034: Team Foundation was unable to initialize the workbook". That was painful. I rely on this particular workbook to do most of my reporting overhead and wanted to get this resolved quickly.

After finding a few posts that talked about TFS 2010 (which we are not using yet) I found this post from Granth's Blog that wasn't quite the issue I had but it was close enough.

I downloaded the hotfix listed on this Microsoft page (FIX: You can no longer connect to a Team Foundation server from Excel after you insert a column in a worksheet) even though it wasn't my exact problem and it worked.

Moving from MVC Beta to MVC 1.0

During this sprint, one of our clients upgraded from the MVC Beta to MVC 1.0 and I wanted to share what Joe wikied into the team wiki because it might be useful to the rest of us. :)

To upgrade to 1.0 release, you will need to uninstall ASP.NET MVC BETA. You can do this by going to "Add/Remove Programs" under "Control Panel" and find MVC Beta and remove it. Once you have done that, you can download ASP.NET MVC 1.0 from this link.

Once the install is done, do a get latest from TFS.

You can find the Release Notes from ASP.NET team:

• RC1 Release Notes
• RC2 Release Notes
• Release 1.0 Release Notes

There are some changes in 1.0 release compared to the BETA version we have been using up until 3/31/2009. Begining April 1st, all of our ASP.NET MVC project in TFS will be based on 1.0 release. Here are some of the highlights of the upgrade:

• Views no longer need code-behind by default
• Visual Studio experience improvements:
  • New contextual commands like "Add Controller", "Add View", etc
  • Able to create partial view (ascx) as a view using the new contextual command
  • Basic scaffolding for strongly type views (list, edit, etc)
  • Ability to add custom scaffolding templates
• Page title is now setable in the ViewPage instead of just in Master.Page
• Strongly typed HTML (AJAX) Helper
• Smarter and less verbose binding for POST forms, including with complex objects
• CSRF Protection
• New file handling methods (for upload/download files)
• Updated jQuery lib to 1.3.2

You can read a more detailed overview in ScottGu's blog here.

For our site(s), I had to manually do certain several things:

• Remove all the code behinds and update the ascxs and aspxs to bind correctly
• Update our jQuery references
• Change HTML helper call to DropDownList since the upgrade changed the API parameters
• Change all <"button"> to <%=Html.Button ... %> since behaves like if button type is not specified correctly
• Change every UpdateModel method call to "TryUpdateModel" to utilize non-exception invalid data handling and modify our controllers to display error message correctly
• Add CSRF validation attribute to all POST action methods in all of our controllers
• Add CSRF tag within all of our forms to work with CSRF attributes in our controllers
• Change Delete action method to POST instead of GET to enhance security

Calculating Business Days in a Scheduling System

We just had a little coding competition in the office to solve "how best to code a scheduling object calculator" and Johannes did a great job recapping the issues and the alternative paths to a solution and showing which really is the best way to go.

Happy reading!